Anyhow; I love it.  I like:

• the fact that AppBrain exists, which gives me a nice website for browsing the Android Market from a real browser, and not through frigging iTunes (I have an iPod Touch, and, well, being tied to iTunes is a bit annoying).
• the integration with Google accounts, including Google Apps.  I have a few of these and it was a breeze to sync them up and use them (though I did have to turn off email sync, since a) I prefer to actively go fetch email rather than be interrupted on someone else’s schedule, and b) it drained the battery noticeably when it was turned on).
• Google Maps – finally I have a smartphone that can tell me where I am, with a decent interface!  The previous phone’s app was barely alright for finding myself, let alone finding my way around.
• the possibility of actually writing some software for it – I’ve got a couple of reasonably achievable-sounding ideas that, if I ever get around to, aren’t going to be subject to Apple’s draconian protocols.
• the idea that the Android OS will get upgraded and the upgrade be pushed to my phone independent of the damn carrier.  T-Mobile UK sucked at keeping up with Windows Mobile updates; it took them 2 years to make a ROM for 6.1 for my phone with their poxy crapware branding on it…
• the apps; CardioTrainer for tracking exercise; KeepassDroid + DropBox for syncing my password database; NewsRob for being an awesome offline feed reader; Twidroid for getting me into Twitter properly; Subsonic for streaming my home music on the move (though T-Mobile’s spotty 3G coverage doesn’t help…); Evernote; TripIt…  I was childishly amused at the spirit level I found, and I’ve found the WiFi analyser useful in every friend’s house I’ve gone to, advising them to change to a less contested WiFi channel for better signal.

So, yeah.  Heartily recommended – except not, of course, since the problem with Android is that manufacturers are releasing newer better handsets at such a prodigious rate that 2 months later there are already better handsets just about to come out.  That said, I don’t regret the purchase the tiniest bit.

Battery life could be better (but at least it’s a changeable battery, so I could get a spare if it’s really a problem, and it hasn’t been yet), and I’m peeved at T-Mobile’s aforementioned crappy coverage from time to time, but, well…  I’ve been seen using my phone to browse the web while idly sitting in front of my turned-on computer (with, obviously, a full, proper screen and so on), and then mildly ridiculed by my girlfriend for not noticing the computer in front of me.

It’s a really nice phone to use!

So I’ve never been to a music festival.  This is a fact that my new girlfriend (A) was taken ever-so-slightly aback by (along with news that I don’t eat Marmite and prefer coffee over tea – I retain the opinion that her opinions are not yet above suspicion…).  So, off to Download for the (last) weekend.  This is a heavy-metal, rock, and alternative music festival held at Donington race-track near Leicester.  Oh, and we’ll camp.

There’s no internet at this campsite.

I receive a three-page (formatted) word document of stuff that will come in handy, as well as a) which things A already has and shall take, and; b) which things are absolutely essential.  In the latter category are things like wellington boots, waterproof trousers and top, warm clothes, sunscreen, and many, many pocket-pack paper tissues.  Apparently, in the UK in June, it has been known for campsites to wash away in the torrential misery of rain that happens along, and waterproof trousers will allow for survival (if, perhaps, not a complete alleviation of abject misery while watching the tent collapse into a pool of mud as it rolls down the hill).  Well, I took her warning to heart and duly laid hands on waterproof trousers and top, and happily have some sturdy boots of the walking persuasion from my time spent at York University up in the Northern Frozen Wastes of God’s County – colour me prepared (at least, as much as I was going to be).

We drive up on Thursday night (I’ve had the foresight to book Friday and Monday off), and arrive to pitch tent just as twilight is waning – it takes a half hour to walk from the field in which cars are parked to the field in which tents are pitched (apparently there is some festival tradition that dictates the two must be at opposite ends of the site).  I fail to trip over any guy-ropes, what with having paid attention to the need to bring a torch.  We’re camping in style, too; no sleeping bags for us, instead we’ve got an air-mattress, pillows, and a duvet.  And very little space for anything else.

Like the internet.

It’s quite hot, too.  As events transpire, I’m feeling rather smug about the fact that all my stuff fits in one small backpack, and all hers fits in one of those travel-the-world backpacker packs – that’s slightly unfair, what with her doing the lion’s share of planning and execution and me only really being along for the ride (and said-backpack lugging duty… ;-) ).  I don’t recall a single drop of rain until we were safely in the car for the trip home, late Sunday night.  Apparently, the weather report was wrong.  Who would have thought?  Lucky we had sunscreen; my lily-white skin caught some burn even so.

The music itself was great, subjective an opinion though that is.  We saw Faith No More, Def Leppard, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson (does he have to get his supporting band members to sign a contract saying he can abuse them?), Hollywood Undead, a bit of ZZ Top, Trivium, and Prodigy (who frankly, ****ing rocked, live!) and a few others.  We slept in and missed some stuff we kinda wanted to see, but not badly enough to trump wanting to find a pool to take a swim in (rather than brave the showers).  We fairly glowed with smug cleanliness as we rejoined our fellow refuge^H^H^H^H^Hcampers on the site, if I do say so myself…

It was actually very much more civilised than I was kinda expecting!  I had a fantastic weekend, even if I’ll continue to tease her about the size of her pack and some other stuff for a little while yet…  ;-)

The new job is as a developer at Onalytica.  I’m still figuring out precisely what it is I’m working on, though, and exactly what I can blog about in reference to it.  I can tell you it’s a great change, however; just the fact that I’m now working in a team where everyone is in the same room is a massive improvement!  Suffice to say I’m enjoying myself immensely.  We’re hiring, by the way; currently looking for a quantitative models researcher and an internet-scale data-centre Windows sysadmin.

I’m putting in some effort on IncludeCombiner, so I can get to the stage where I can contribute it to MVCContrib; the idea is that it’s a drop-in, turn-on kind of toy for people doing ASP.NET MVC websites.  ”Oh, I need to improve my site’s loading times; what’s the easiest thing I can do?  Ah!  Turn on CSS/script minification/compression/caching!” kinda thing.

I’m also gradually working on rake-dotnet, though here I’m incrementally fixing issues that come up during real-life use at work and on IncludeCombiner.  Kyle Baley wired it up to Codebetter.com’s TeamCity instance recently, and once the latest rake-dotnet gem is installed there, I should see the first green build (“It works on my machine!” dammit! ;-) ).  Next on the list to-do is Gallio support, NDepend support, more NCover reporting support (since the nice people at NCover granted me a license for this, I kinda feel obligated!) and a few bits of friction-elimination like detecting where 3rd-party tools are installed when they’re not present in source-control.

I’m also preparing for my first ever round of stand-up comedy; I’ll be presenting rake-dotnet at the forthcoming Skillsmatter event on 16th June in London.  I’m quite excited about it.  It won’t just touch rake-dotnet (since the point of the library is “working build script in 30ish lines of code” I don’t think that will take awfully long!); I’ll see if I can work in a demo of wiring a project up to TeamCity continuous integration, since that’s (CI, not specifically TeamCity) most of the point of having a one-click build in the first place.

There’s a whole different mindset to using a Mac.  I know, I know; “It just works” has surely been beaten to death (even though it’s pretty accurate).  The best way that I can articulate it is, well, you need to unlearn thinking complicatedly.  

Case in point – I inserted a DVD into the front of my MacBook Pro.  There’s no obvious way to eject it (having been conditioned to expect a little plastic eject button next to the slot, like on a PC), when it doesn’t mount (normally, it auto-mounts, and you special-click on the icon and click eject).  So, off to google – “how to eject dvd from macbook pro” – I plaintively type.  Several answers:

• Hold down the trackpad button during bootup (I don’t want to reboot right now!  How insane!)
• Power up the Mac and leave it alone for 10min (again.  And, how does it decide it should eject the DVD?)
• … press the eject key on the keyboard

Um.  Right.

It turns out “simplest thing that could possibly work” is still just not inside my tunnel vision, sometimes…

Actually, this is far harder than I thought it would be.  The NHS has sold me the x-rays on a CD-ROM (for the princely sum of £10!  I don’t remember signing a model release form…  These are pictures of my own body-part!), but on it is not a pair of high-quality JPGs.  Oh no.  Instead, there’s some Windows software of dubious quality that slowly opens up my patient records (no security!) and a pair of DCM files of the x-rays.  It turns out that DICOM is a file-format used as output from various radiological imaging devices.  On my Mac, I google tells me I need OsiriX to view them – good thing I know how to use this “internet” thing, eh?

(10 minutes later)

Strike that.  I clearly don’t.  Instead, I’ve got a friend to extract them for me; thanks Alex!

Happily, according to the nice people at A&E, this is what the inside of a healthy knee should look like.

The recommendations engine is … scary.  It seems to work by collecting data from (at least) your answering multiple-choice questions; it takes your answers into account, much like I imagine Last.fm’s musical neighbourhood algorithm works (or at least, that’s what I dimly remember reading about).  But it also asks you what you’d want your ideal match to answer (here, you can pick more than one choice), and rate how important that answer would be to you.  It’s engaging.  It’s accessible and intuitive.  It encourages you to do “just one more!”, and addicts you.  One can submit one’s own questions and attendant answers; I imagine there’s a bucket of thousands upon thousands by now.

There’s a fully-featured quiz feature, too, where one can take tests – again, multiple-choice, but here you’re scored within the context of the test and given a result at the end.  I was in stitches most of the way through The Gentleman Test, which is one of a myriad user-contributed tests (though you might need to sign in to see it; no idea).  This, quite frankly, is Web 2.0 user-generated-content at its finest!

It’s possible to compare one’s profile to that of someone one is interested in, and see both little graphs of how they differ, but also how far each deviates from the general population.  It’s got AJAX that actually does progressively enhance functionality (not that I’ve tried it with JS turned off).  It updates without needing to refresh the page, and it does chat in a clever way; it seems to also use some server-push or comet.  It loads fast.  Its design is nice, and doesn’t break due to AdBlock removing the ads.

Chiefly; it conspires to be addictive.  From the wording of the hint-text (“oh, you want to upload a file? [local] [website] Great! Tell us where it is: [file input]” instead of just “upload photo: [file input]“) to the way that they’ve added keyboard shortcuts to the question-answering part, to the generally … bouncy, bright-eyed feel of the site as a whole.  As I said, everything I’ve found so far is geared to serving me, the user, to get what I want, and that’s rare with software (which in itself is a pretty sad state of affairs).

It’s refreshing to see software done so well.

At university, I rowed (for you Yanks; “crew”).  To be perfectly honest, I probably spent more time doing sports than studying for my degree, but, well, in hindsight I’ve found about 10% of my degree to be useful in real-life, and 100% of the consequences of sports ;-)  If only they’d taught us source-control, unit-tests/BDD/whatever-your-preferred-moniker, and CI in the first month, though…

Anyway.  Rowing.  You get eight guys in a boat all sat facing backwards.  Stay with me here.  Give them each an oar and a sliding seat, and tell them to row.  But – and this is the kicker – in time with each other.  It’s also often a good idea to sit another guy (or girl; we call both the coxswain, or cox) at the very back of the boat, facing forwards (this orientation turns out to be quite important) – their job is to steer (we shall veer away from the fact that rowing boats are not designed to go around corners…), encourage, and, if it’s not a race, coach.  Oh, and tell the rest of the crew that stroke (the guy furthest back – thus the one whose blade the rest can all see – who is responsible for setting rhythm) thinks they’re rushing him.

The boat will go quicker when all of the rowers are perfectly in time (“perfectly” in the fullest sense of the word).  As you row, and get good at it, it becomes obvious to tell by feel when the boat is set (balanced, not dipping to either bow or stroke-side (I’m a Brit, and shall use Brit rowing parlance!)) and the crew is in time through the evolution of the strokes.  You don’t need to watch your blade; you fix your eyes on the neck of the rower in front and concentrate on it to the exclusion of all else (except the cox’ commands, naturally).  Good rowing develops by muscle memory – your body gets to know how to move through the stroke; how to shift weight, how to balance, how to react to the movements of the rest of the crew, how to exert pressure on the blade – all of this becomes instinctual (er, after practise, which – frankly – hurts… ;-)  ).

One has to put in a lot of effort to the training to do well at rowing – obviously, this is a competition.  You have to strive to improve continuously.  There is the muscles-and-fitness aspect which is pretty easy to grasp; big, strong people will pull on the blade harder – ugh!  Make boat go fast!  Simple.  There’s also the technique part, which is harder to learn.  Your body needs to be flexible, and it needs to be trained to move as the rowing stroke demands, combined with the vagaries of the boat you’re using and the rest of the crew.  There are subtleties that you just don’t notice until later, and then suddenly you do and your performance receives a kick in the pants for almost no extra outlay (“push with the legs, dammit, don’t pull with the arms” at first, and then “fast on the drive, slow on the recovery”…) – a deeper insight if you will, into exactly how to do this rowing thing.  Diet and nutrition play a part.

Rowing training hurts.  Weights, circuits, runs; this is not a thing you do a couple hours a week.  Ergo (rowing machines; usually Concept IIs) land training hurts a lot.  Squad ergos can be worse still (you’re racing on an ergo to keep your seat in the crew, and you’re not even in the boat on the water – remember that’s the fun part!).  I think it’s reasonable to say that there are no casual rowers in the world; everyone that rows well rows competitively – there’s just too much effort going in to not try to justify it without some kind of competitive reward.  Consider the amount of sheer bloody-minded tenacity that that means the average rower has (not to mention self-discipline), to continue to row when they’re not winning (in a six-lane regatta, five crews lost…).  This is one of those sports where it really is the winning, not the taking part that counts (yet it’s still sporting I hasten to add) – I think it’s fair to say that there are no casual rowing crews (scullers are a different matter).

When you get it right, there is something … spiritual … about the experience.  The crisp, sunny early Spring mornings with the morning mist burning off, when the water is like glass and you’re in perfect harmony – there is one blade clunk, not eight – with your crew, part of the gestalt as you power through the training routine of the day…  I miss that.  That and the feeling of winning a six lane regatta after a day of competition. ;-)

What the hell does that have to do with agile software development?

• You’re making a commitment to your crew that you won’t **** up your part.  Unlike other team sports, it’s impossible to hide slacking off training or in the boat; a well-run crew is melded into a unit that trains, socialises, and races together; there’s healthy rivalry during seat-races, and there’s camaraderie inside the boat and out.  Same with agile software development; you’re making a commitment to your team that you’re going to take pride in helping the team achieve its collective goal; shipping.
• Working in a gelled team is hugely rewarding, just as rowing in a good crew.  It’s the people in it that make it a rewarding experience, though; you take out what you put in.
• You succeed or fail together.  Doesn’t matter if you did your 2k in 5:47 if the crew as a whole kept catching crabs during the race itself.  Doesn’t matter if you finished your feature ahead of time but the rest of the team stumbled.
• Healthy rivalry encourages team-members to better themselves and their peers; it’s a good feedback loop.
• Refactoring your technique to deeper insight applies in both disciplines.
• Training and improvement requires self-discipline.
• Perfection makes the boat go faster.  But it’s impossible to be perfect.  But all crews want to be.
• Most importantly; you know when it’s going well, and when it’s not.

When I interview people, I take note of those that put team-sports on their CV, and quiz them on what they got out of it.  Rowing (for all the pain it involved ;-)  ) had such a positive result on my own career and development as a person, it would be a bit strange not to.

The second phase of the diet is what I’m now five weeks into.  Having done the abstinence part (which is really the weight-loss part), I’m now on this GI diet, where different foods are introduced over the period of three months.  The idea is that there are foods (with a low GI rating) that metabolise slower – vegetables, protein, soya and the like – and thus one can go longer between feeling hunger (or, actually, thirst as it turns out – lots of people mistake the latter for the former).  This second phase is all about figuring out that it’s possible to survive on “healthy” things (carbohydrate-heavy foods aren’t on the approved list for another couple of weeks, though I admit Christmas and Boxing Day were an exercise in food-reminiscence…), as well as figuring out when foods “trigger” over-eating.  That “oh, I could have some more of that” subconscious impulse that strikes even the best of us down.

I think I’m doing well.  Here’s a picture of the graph of my weight over the last few months (see if you can spot Christmas… :-(  ).  As you can see, I started out at 103kg (or a body/mass index of 32 or so; I’m 181cm tall), finished the abstinence at 73kg-ish, and am now roughly maintaining around the 75kg mark.  I’m currently eating mostly salad, vegetables, and fish or light meat, and coping quite well without junk food (I haven’t had a packet of crisps in around six months, for example).  In the same time, I also didn’t have a drop of alcohol – that, combined with the food, means I’ve got a rather clean gut at the moment, which in turn means things taste differently (better!).

I’ve also started doing some strength training as well as this running and rowing stuff I’ve been doing anyway.  I saw this thing that is basically a strap with handles that one can do various and many resistance exercises with – check out the videos.  It’s nice and simple, light, and works a treat.  I’ve used it every day for a week, and have noticed that my time on my run is down about 90 seconds, and it takes me about two minutes less time to do 10km on the Concept II.  For the cost of the strap and 20 minutes a day using it – that’s a pretty favourable trade in my book!  Talking about fitness; my resting heart-rate is down about 12bpm from ~72 at the start of the abstinence to ~50, and my average heart-rate during a 4 mile run is now about 155 instead of 167 (and I do the same run in 28min compared to 42 min).  I’m sleeping better (and not needing as long; down 2 hours from 9h to 7h each night), and generally feeling great!

I’ve been pretty sedentary over the last two years – I used to work 5 miles away, and would commute by bike – and, well, I decided I’d had enough of the creeping waistline.  Note purely in the interests of vanity; I rowed at university, and miss being quite as fit as that demanded.  There were lots of negative reactions from people when I explained what I was doing (and a lot of it completely uninformed!), but so far, this has been one of the best decisions I think I’ve ever made.  I’ve shown I can follow through on something, break habits, and achieve quite a difficult goal (ditching 25% of my bodymass!).  

What to pick for a New Year’s resolution in the absence of Ye Olde Reliable “go to the gym more”, though?!